On the Ground at UBS’ Private AI, Software and Internet Conference | Menlo Park

**Akash Pasricha** (0:07)
Welcome, everyone, to a special edition of The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, July 15th, and we are here on the ground in Menlo Park at UBS Private AI Software and Internet Conference, where we're gonna be talking to a number of people here about the current state of the software sector. We're gonna talk about the current state of AI research. We're gonna talk about the future of robotics and what that has to hold. We're gonna have some great conversations for you. Before we get started, I wanna turn it over to Rocket Drew, who is in our San Francisco Bureau. He has a quick news update for you. Rocket, over to you.

**Rocket Drew** (0:46)
Thanks, Akash. The Information's Asia Bureau published exclusive reporting that strong revenue growth at DeepSeek is empowering the company to raise its second funding round of about $7.4 billion and plot a potential public offering in Shanghai next year. Their annualized revenue reached between $400 million and $500 million recently. We're going to have more from our Asia Bureau on that story tomorrow.
Another piece of news, Stripe and PE firm Advent International have submitted an offer to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion according to reporting from Reuters. The outlet says PayPal has not responded to the offer and that Stripe and Advent want to advance discussions in the coming weeks. We'll keep our eye on that story.
Meanwhile, Cursor, the code-in startup set to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion later this year, has been mapping out a major transformation. Let's bring in our colleague Grace Kay for more on this story. Welcome back on the show, Grace.

**Grace Kay** (1:50)
Hi, Rocket. Great to be here.

**Rocket Drew** (1:52)
You heard about a company-wide meeting earlier this year. What was it that Cursor CEO Michael Truell told his staff at that meeting?

**Grace Kay** (2:00)
Yeah. Michael outlined a new strategy for the company.
What has famously been a coding startup is now pivoting towards general AI models. He put some deadlines out there. They want to be one of the top AI companies by the end of the year. They want to have the most compute by 2027 and be pushing the boundaries of AI by then. He also addressed some concerns from staff around the SpaceX actuation. It was a pretty big meeting for the company.

**Rocket Drew** (2:32)
Does this shed some light on why SpaceX AI was interested in acquiring Cursor in the first place? There's always been a little bit of a mystery around that to me.

**Grace Kay** (2:42)
Yeah. I think initially going into it, my thought was obviously they want the coding data just because they've been struggling so much with their grok coding model.
But one thing that Michael noted in one of the meetings shortly after this partnership was announced, he talked about how SpaceX was really excited because of Cursor's brand and some of the enterprise relationships they have. A lot of Fortune 500 companies are their customers. They also have a really large go-to-market sales, marketing team, much larger than XAIs.

**Rocket Drew** (3:19)
It's funny, XAI didn't have a great brand going into this. It's hard to imagine they would look at any company and think that brand has a worse brand than ours. But I guess Cursor does have a great brand. So it makes sense.
How are staff feeling about the acquisition right now at Cursor?

**Grace Kay** (3:36)
Yeah, I think feelings are mixed. I think there are some people who are maybe excited to partner with SpaceX. They have the IPO. It's a big company right now. But there are also a lot of people who are concerned about the acquisition. I talked to some people who they looked at Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter when he cut three quarters of the company.
There's obviously concerns about cuts, I think, with any acquisition. But with Elon Musk, he's known for that. So that's definitely a concern.

**Rocket Drew** (4:06)
Yeah, he's hard to work for at best. Then when he acquires your company, it can be a little ruthless, I guess. How is Cursor changing ahead of the acquisition right now?

**Grace Kay** (4:18)
Yeah. So Cursor is trying to pivot to become more of a generalized AI company. They're working on this Claude Cowork competitor, which is internally being called Sand and that they've rolled out in our testing. They're also looking at some chatbots. They're looking at different ways they can push beyond coding.
Michael internally has characterized this as something that customers have been pushing for. But it is interesting that some of the goals he outlined in these meetings with staff are very similar to goals that Elon Musk has outlined at XAI. So it's similar how right now they're in parallel, but they're aligned on a lot of things.